GeoSemantics. Earthly Memories and Inhuman Becomings in the Global South (Part One) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
In both literature and philosophy, geologic matter has been imagined as a vector of extending perception and analysis into the territory of not only the non-human, but also the non-living, challenging the very distinctions between life and non-life, agile and inert matter. Recently, the debates over the concept of the Anthropocene amplified our fascination with the geologic, bringing into view the inescapable bond of human and Earth’s history. The article probes the possibilities of the geologic turn through two short stories published in the era of the Anthropocene debates—Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress” (2013) and A.S. Byatt’s “Stone Woman” (2003). The stories’ interest in a geologic setting, their staging of human-mineral intimacies, and their geologically-infused aesthetics positions these two stories as fictions of the geologic turn. I examine how these writers—through reconfiguring the relations between bios and geos, human and nonhuman—forge alternatives to an extractive relation to the geos, as well as refuse to accept the figure of Earth as either an inert object or a victim. In this reframing, they also exemplify feminist critique of the imagined unity of “Anthropos” that is named by the Anthropocene thinkers.
Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics
" Nature " and " social life " tended to be separated by Enlightenment thinkers, setting the stage for a long-standing tension between geology and social-cultural theory. Such a division suppressed the liveliness that humans have often attributed to material things. Several scholars and artists, many of whom would advocate new materialisms, have attempted to recapture this liveliness. Drawing upon these developments, we use the notion of " geosocialities " (the commingling of the geologic and the social and the sensibilities involved) to facilitate appreciation of the mineral and the alignment between geology and social cultural theory. While geosocialities overlap with nature-cultures and " biosocialities, " they are " harder " in the sense of drawing attention to geology and its relation to social life. Such a move seems timely, keeping in mind the popular claim that in the Anthropocene, humans have become a geologic force. At the same time, it opens up a down-to-earth form of geopolitics that exceeds classic notions of the term, attending to different geologic scales; to living bodies, human and nonhuman; to solid rock; and to the planet. We develop our argument through engagement with two sites. One concerns the inscription of human activities in volcanic rock, the second the embodiment of isotopes in living beings. These examples raise questions about the multiple scales of geosociality, which intertwine biography and Earth " itself. "
Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South
Cultural Anthropology, 2020
Abstract: This article theorizes the uneven entanglements between settler processes of ruination, a dynamic structured by regimes of history/prehistory, life/death, and life/nonlife, and “mound power,” or the force-relations exercised by Indigenous landscapes as animate beings in their own right. I draw on research with members of a community in the US South who claim Muskogee ancestry visiting ancestral “mound’ or earthwork and shellwork sites built over the last six thousand years. Wounded by ongoing colonial violence, these landscapes call out to descendants, drawing them into ancestral movements and relations of care. In these moments, ancestral sites refuse to be fixed within terminal chronological periods removed from a settled present, enrolling descendants into Indigenous spacetimes that dramatically exceed colonial timescales and temporalities. Drawing on this deep historical perspective, this article articulates a modest hope for the ways Indigenous landscapes, as agentive beings, animate decolonial possibilities for life in the ruins of colonial empires.
In Geologia Veritas Some Anthropological Remarks
matteo-meschiari.com
My contribution focuses on geology from an epistemological point of view, not as a mere "link" between sciences and humanities, but as the holistic discipline that can produce new enquiry methods and new ethical approaches to physical and cultural landscapes. The perspective sometimes adopted by geologists in resolving the dialectics between perception and representation, processing discontinuous data, learning by errors, and producing theoretical models, is -historically and hermeneutically -a hybrid practice, a transdisciplinarity in action. Using anthropological and ethnographic data, and showing that it is possible to hypothesize a landscape-oriented model of the human mind and cognitive processes, I will argue that modern geology, in a certain way of speaking, is still -and alsoa cosmographic thought about Land. 0.0 Premise: As the title of my contribution suggests, I would like to talk about geology as a model of philosophical and socio-cultural thought. I will do this point by point, each of which could be greatly developed: (1) ethnogeology in non-western societies; (2) protogeology in pre-scientific western culture; (3) geophilosophy in post-modernity. My idea is that (4) these types of geological knowledge have something in common: they are the result of universal cognitive processes. In conclusion I will mention (5) their epistemological and sociological importance for culture in general and modern geology in particular.
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022
Archeological sites are often made distinct by barriers, zoning, signage, and controlled access. Yet socially, sites are integrated into, rather than plucked from, intricate and maintained cultural landscapes. Jessica Joyce Christie’s Earth Politics and Intangible Heritage: Three Case Studies in the Americas engages in three examples of communities living around archaeologically defined areas from North, Central, and South America. In particular, Christie examines how three Indigenous communities, each grappling with layered and internal colonialisms, conceptualize and maintain memory within different landscapes under distinct economic, religious, and environmental conditions. Christie’s work does not starkly contrast archeological knowledge with Indigenous knowledge, but rather seeks to integrate land-based identities and ways of knowing into the manners that the cultural landscapes are made, patterned, and inhabited.
Acta Academica, 2022
Reconceptualising ecofascism in the Global South: an ecosemiotic approach to problematising marginalised nostalgic narratives This paper provides an argument for the need to reconceptualise ecocritical concepts that have naively been regarded as central, and thus global, scholarly concepts. Focusing in particular on ecofascism, the paper argues that if forms of ecocriticism are to be explored in a Global South context, certain concepts associated with ecofascism and anti-progress in the Global North, such as nostalgia, need to be revisited. Such an attempt is made in this paper by introducing the concept of solastalgia to explain the intense disease experienced by a loss of place (caused by, for instance, environmental destruction), and the consequent necessity for different kinds of responses and actions. By situating this study within the paradigm of critical ecosemiotics, focus is placed on the significance of locality (rather than globality) in understanding the relationship between nature and culture, and thereby re-addressing Western ecofascist critique.